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THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 31, 2014
year. She was also the first woman to
choreograph and direct a full-length per-
formance at New York City Ballet. An
homage to silent films, "Double Feature"
(2004), two fifty-minute dances set to
the music of Irving Berlin and Walter
Donaldson, remains among the most
popular programs in the repertory.
Stroman's appearance on the scene, in
the nineties, revitalized Broadway story-
telling after a dismal de-
cade dominated by dance-
challenged British musi-
cals. Where Jerome Rob-
bins's dances had brought
athleticism and line to
Broadway, and Bob Fosse's
had brought iconoclasm
and style, Stroman's cho-
reography offered wit and
raise-the-roof rambunctiousness. The
secret to her musical game is transi-
tions---how people enter and exit, how
the characters interact with the set, how
the story is told through the swift shift-
ing of spatial and emotional gears. For
the song "Slap That Bass," in "Crazy for
You," for instance, the chorines became
bass fiddles, and in the show's sensational
first-act finale the miners of Deadwood,
Nevada, learned rhythm from Broadway
showgirls, who pulverized their pros-
pecting pans and were swung around
on mining picks. For "Springtime for
Hitler," in "The Producers," Stroman in-
vented pigeons with swastikas on their
wings, and in "Along Came Bialy," in the
same show, a crowd of lusty old coots
danced through Little Old Lady Land
with their walkers. Even in last year's
"Big Fish," an adaptation of the Tim
Burton movie, which failed to please the
critics, Stroman, who directed and cho-
reographed, managed a couple of unfor-
gettable moments, including a circus
fantasy, during which three behemoth
elephants shook their backsides and tap-
danced. "There's a part of her, a secret
well of joy, that she doesn't let the world
touch," Mel Brooks said. "It's there in her
work."
At the New 42nd Street Studios, Stro-
man was dressed in her director's uniform:
black shoes, black pants, black tunic. Her
clothes, like everything else in her life, are
designed to make her more effective at her
job; she strategically plays down her looks
and plays up the "worker bee," as she de-
scribes her style. "You can't think about
yourself when you get dressed. You can
only think about what you're working on
here," she said. Even her nickname, Stro,
by which she is almost universally known
on the Rialto, conjures up a kind of hail-
fellow, de-feminized image, which for
years she encouraged by wearing a base-
ball cap and a ponytail.
Pondering the stage picture that ends
the first act of "Bullets," Stroman reached
into the model set, pulled
out a plastic cup full of
characters, and fished out a
figurine of Olive, a show-
girl who longs to be a
Broadway actress and gets
her gangster sugar daddy to
buy her a starring role in a
lame Broadway play. Then
Stroman picked up a toy-
size crimson-and-gold railroad car and
put it on the set. "Over here is the end of
Act I," she said. "A big train comes on and
we see the principals in each window. At
the end, of course, girls are tapping on the
very top of the train. Then there's a girl
hanging off the back in an Art Deco pose.
Just wonderful."
Toting water bottles and scripts, the
ensemble began to clatter into the room.
Stroman excused herself. "I've got to go
hug everybody here," she said. When the
cast were settled in their seats, she stood
to rally the troops. "Happy New Year!
What's better than starting it with a
Broadway show?" she said. One at a
time, the performers gave their name and
the number of Stroman shows they'd
done. Before they were sent off to sing
through the score, Stroman instructed
them on the inspirations for the dance
movements they'd be perfecting over the
next three months. "You know, when I
say to you to make this more turned in,
this way, more like a stick figure---that's
based on John Held's photos and car-
toons of that time," she said, holding up
a John Held, Jr., cartoon of two knock-
kneed Charleston dancers from her in-
formation packet. She continued, "On
page 4, there are a lot of Erté images. I
know we always say to the ladies, 'You're
hitting an Erté pose.' So that's what
you're hitting when you see that. Also the
Vargas girls, the famous Vargas girls
from the twenties. You know, in 'Tiger
Rag,' when you're sitting on the floor,
there are a lot of poses there that are
based on the Vargas girls. The whole
show is immersed in that time period,
choreographically." Then it was time for
the ensemble and the musical director to
go to work. Stroman left them to it.
Room 7-B, on the seventh floor of the
New 42nd Street Studios, is dedi-
cated to Stroman's late husband, Mike
Ockrent, a British director, who died of
leukemia in 1999, at the age of fifty-three.
His motto, "Rehearsal is the best part," is
emblazoned, along with his name, on a
plaque beside the door. When Stroman
works on the seventh floor, before the
start of every day she runs her fingers
across the deeply indented letters of his
name. "It feels like a sculpture in your
hands," she said.
The two met in 1991 and collabo-
rated on "Crazy for You," which Ock-
rent directed. "When Mike left to go
back to London, I swear I didn't feel
anything or know anything," Stroman
said, as the "Bullets" chorus, down the
hall, belted out "I'm Sitting on Top of
the World." "He was my director at that
time. He went to London---" She broke
off. "I'm going to cry,'' she said. She
wiped her eyes, then continued, "He
called a couple of weeks after we'd
opened and said he had to come back. I
said, 'Why is that?' In my mind, I was
thinking there was a problem with the
understudies, or why else was he coming
back? He said, 'I have to come back be-
cause I've fallen in love with you.' I
thought, Well, let's start dating. We've
been through a tech together, so now I
know everything about this man."
Intimacy requires equality; Stroman
and Ockrent teamed up when both were
in their artistic prime, and each had ex-
pertise to offer the other. The curly-
haired Ockrent, who had studied phys-
ics at the University of Edinburgh, was
well spoken, well read, and well in-
formed; his sophistication and encour-
agement pitched Stroman's professional
ambitions higher. "He was her Henry
Higgins," said David Thompson, who
wrote the book for five of Stroman's mu-
sicals, including "The Scottsboro Boys"
(2010), her bold, minimalist experiment
with social comment. "Mike got Stro to
start looking at what the theatre could be
from a different perspective, to look at
herself as a bigger artist." For her part,
Stroman made Ockrent laugh. Through-
out their time together, he left mash